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Juliet Capulet's Summer Epithalamion Soliloquy
According to William Shakespeare's play "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" ''Act Three Scene Two, this love poem describes about how fourteen-year-old Juliet Capulet, who is the beautiful and innocent young daughter of the wealthy Lord Capulet and Lady Capulet, spends a short moment alone by herself in her bedchamber with a balcony that overlooks the view of the orchard gardens and swimming pools on that bright Summer afternoon in the Italian city of Verona, waiting anxiously and impatiently for the Sun to go down beneath the horizon so that her beloved sixteen-year-old husband Romeo Montague, the son of her parents' mortal enemies, the Montague family, will quietly sneak his way up there and consummate their true love for each other. Of course, she was still daydreaming about how her happy future life with Romeo would like if their two families would to learn to understand one another in a friendly matter by her best means of despising and rejecting the unwanted advances and unscrupulous marriage proposals of her former suitor and enemy of her parents' worst choosing upon her, Prince Escalus of Verona's idiotic and scorned second cousin named Count Paris. This radiant speech is the perfect one in which Juliet Capulet is anxiously awaiting Romeo Montague's arrival before banishment from Verona for killing her cousin Tybalt Capulet who tried to defile him and murdered his best friend Mercutio who is Escalus's favorite cousin and Valentino's older twin brother. It uses many figures of speech to impress on the audience the depth of her love and longing for her beloved sweetheart. Overall, the effect is one of "hyperbole" or exaggeration. She personifies the night as the "loving, black-brow'd night," turning the night into something human and comforting rather than a time of danger. She longs for Romeo and suggests that the joy she feels in seeing him at night makes the clear moonlit night more pleasant than a bright sunny day for her. She imagines that after he dies, his soul might appear reincarnated as the stars in the heavens so beautiful that everybody on the planet Earth would prefer them to the eternal daylight. Her metaphor about purchasing the mansion of love but not possessing it yet refers to the happy love marriage having been performed but it was not consummated. Just as the purchase of a big house is not really complete until one person has finally taken possession of it, the marriage was not completed until it had been consummated on a wedding night. ''"Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner As Phaethon would whip you to the west, And bring in cloudy night immediately. Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, That runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen. Lovers can see to do their amorous rites By their own beauties; or, if love be blind, It best agrees with night. Come, civil night, Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, And learn me how to lose a winning match, Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods: Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks, With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold, Think true love acted simple modesty. Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. O, I have bought the mansion of a love, But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold, Not yet enjoy'd: so tedious is this day As is the night before some festival To an impatient child that hath new robes And may not wear them. O, here comes my nurse, And she brings news; and every tongue that speaks But Romeo's name speaks heavenly eloquence." Website: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.3.2.html